Earth Day: Why are rare species safeguards delayed?

Even those who generally oppose species protections note that the administration’s environmental focus is on energy production, climate change and air pollution. However, administration officials said the number of candidate species has declined since the 2007 and they are trying to recover them without formal protections.

“To date, we haven’t seen a lot of significant changes from the Bush administration,” said Brian Hawthorne, public lands policy director for the BlueRibbon Coalition, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for off-road vehicle enthusiasts. “We are pleasantly surprised that (Obama) hasn’t sort of bent to the tremendous pressure that the extreme environmental community has put on him.”

Endangered species were a flash point during the Bush era partly because that’s when former U.S. Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Tracy, tried to rewrite the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Business and farming interests have criticized the law as needlessly hampering private property rights, while environmentalists defend the law’s role in keeping plants and animals from disappearing.

Habitat and species never were major campaign issues for Obama, but Huta and others figured his emphasis on science-based decisions would provide a sharp contrast to his predecessor.

Officials at the Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency that handles most endangered species, said they are trying to beef up their listing programs but they are constrained by court orders that compel them to process protections for certain species before they take up others.

They continue assessing plants and animals that may need federal protection such as the Thorne’s hairstreak butterfly, which lives in San Diego County’s backcountry. In February, the agency said it did not warrant safeguards because it inhabits more areas than previously known.

Some environmentalists objected to that ruling but it was the decision not to list Hermes copper butterflies that really irked advocates who have been seeking federal defenses for 20 years.

“Everyone agrees that they warrant protection, but they are not getting that protection,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species program leader for the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity. “They are saying they don’t have enough resources, but from our perspective they are not using their resources efficiently.”

In 2005, the center sued the Fish and Wildlife Service for allegedly not making enough progress protecting candidate species.

At the Fish and Wildlife Service office in Carlsbad, spokeswoman Jane Hendron said the Hermes copper decision was made after an in-depth review that involved the best available science.

“It has nothing to do with (whether) there is room on the list,” she said. “It has everything to do with higher priority actions that we are required to take because we have court orders. We have limited funds.”

The agency has about $22 million in its budget for listing species in 2011, and about half of that is set aside for determining habitat critical to already listed species. The agency’s entire budget for the endangered species program has been about $180 million in recent years, but acting director Rowan Gould recently asked Congress to chip in another $3.3 million in 2012, partly to bolster the listing program.

“Since 2007 the Service has been petitioned to add more than 1,230 species to the list of threatened and endangered species, more species than the Service listed during the previous 30 years of administering the act,” he said in prepared remarks.